Invasive
Entry posted by Guest
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Invasion! It's not Risk, but it tries to be!
The world is a small map with 12 territories each containing a castle. Surrounding the land portion of the map is an ocean perimeter. The land part of the world gets divided up and everyone gets an equal number of castles. The object of the game is to take over everyone else's castles using your armies. You can attack any castle if it is immediately adjacent to one of your castles. After capturing a castle you get to draw a loot card which gives you gold. Use the gold to buy more armies or to buy a ship which you can use to transport armies to attack castles that aren't immediately adjacent to your already conqured land.
I'll add a picture of the map board when I get a chance.
EDIT: Added board and comment.
If you look around the edges you'll notice "Lake Odyssey", an early "easter egg". You can't read it unless you turn the board sideways! (
) The blue edge is the ocean and allows for ships to sail around and drop off armies if you are invading a territory without a shared border. end EDIT
To Attack a castle there are two phases. The External Battle and the Internal Battle. The external battle by land can be either a Direct Attack or a Sneak Attack.
The Direct Attack is the only time you directly face-off against an opponent using the Odyssey. The duel is simply this: The Attacker sends the Ball Spot across the screen at the highest speed possible, and attempts to wiggle it, using ENGLISH, past the Defender who can only use their Vertical Control to block it. It IS a bit more challenging then, say, Tennis or Football, because of the high speed of the Ball Spot. Really, the game is mostly on the game board and in this case, the video component is used in place of dice, or "rock, paper, scissors". Each successful attack kills two defenders, while failing the attack kills one attacker. You attack until you lose enough armies to make you decide to pull back or until you wittle down the defense to two or less armies.
The Sneak Attack is an all or nothing affair. If successful, you're in and all the defending armies are dead, otherwise, all of your attacking armies are toast. The Sneaky part involves maneuvering your player spot, while it is invisible, from the bottom center of the screen to either north corner of the on-screen castle so that it covers the door there. It isn't very easy. We didn't try this too often (because we didn't play for that long) but this is something that would become easier with practice.
Once you are in the castle, either by Direct or Sneak Attack, you must conduct an Internal Battle, which oddly enough, does not intricately involve your opponent. Using cart #6, the same cart as Roulette, by the way, you start the spot in the center of the screen. Your opponent blanks the spot (by holding down their reset button) while you shift your horizontal/verticle controls enough so that you think that spot will now materialize on top of one of the four guard towers of the castle on the Überlay. The reset button is released and the Ball Spot slides in from off-screen to, hopefully, symbolize a destruction of all the defenders. You have as many chances to try as you have surviving attackers from the initial external battle.
We kind of enjoyed the internal battles, because we found ourselves getting better at predicting where the Ball Spot would land. This didn't save the game, however. We realized, like we did in Football, just how many times we'd have to perform these frustrating and mostly un-fun little video stunts to finish the game. Having just two of us playing meant there were at least 6 castles to capture meaning there would be at least 6 External Battles consisting of one Sneak Attack or multiple Direct Attacks and at least 24 internal battles. At least! We gave up after capturing and recapturing the same castle three times, deciding that the rest of the game would take a really long time and return a proportionately small amount of fun.
It should be noted that this game uses carts #4, #5 and #6 for the various attacks. It comes with a game board, two overlays, a deck of loot cards and at least 300 little tokens representing your armies. The video component detracts from the board game and we found ourselves wishing we could resolve conflicts with a short round of "rock, paper, scissors". We were bored and frustrated by the time we decided to quit. Maybe this game would be more fun with more players, (It can have up to four) but maybe that would just frustrate more people at the same time.
Ultraman gets the point.
Ultraman: 8, Odyssey: 11
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